voiceofthedba's podcast

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CleanSource Code Security

I'm not surprised, and I had expected to read about something like this much sooner. Apparently someone at the ride sharing company, Uber, posted a security key online in a GitHub distribution. I assume this was some sort of code repository for...

I ran across a review of a developer's first year at a company. The company is endjin and the poster describes their first year as a "software engineer apprentice," which is an interesting way to look at one's early career. While it's not...

At times I am rather dismayed by the quality of code I see written today. I'm not sure it's worse than the poor code compiled early in my career, but there are so many more people writing code in our industry that it seems there is more and more...

Microsoft purchased Revolution Analytics recently, a commercial company that works with the R programming language. This seems to be a decision to improve the analytics and analysis offerings from Microsoft. I've heard this will be incorporated...

Amsterdam is trying to become a smart city, with technology and investments being made in ways that will (hopefully) improve the city living experience for residents. There are a lot of items mentioned in the article, but one of the main items that I...

I saw this job in a NYT times piece and was intrigued to see the mention of a computational biologist at the Mt. Sinai Medical Center. This is a job that couldn't have existed in past, as throughout most of history we haven't had computers...

I was watching a presentation recently on refactoring C# code and was amazed by some of the comments that the speakers showed in the code. The example was a real application that had been obfuscated and simplified a bit for the talk. The...

Recently a court in the US ruled that there was no imminent danger from a data breach at a Texas hospital. This is good news and bad news for the world, and I'm a little torn about how I feel. On one hand, it's good for us as data...

I've been studying deployment ideas and technologies for quite some time now, but it's been a focus for the last year or two as my employer is interested in this area. I've been reading books and talking to people, comparing their experiences with my...

There are a number of editions of SQL Server, each of which has different capabilities, features, and restrictions. Over the years, the mix has changed, and it can get confusing for customers trying to decide what to purchase and use. Fortunately...

I was reading Kenneth Fisher's piece on constraints recently and was struck by the fact that this is one of those small changes you make to your coding that has big benefits. In essence, rather than being lazy and writing this:
CREATE TABLE...

I ran across Richard Branson's top quotes on leadership. From a man who's been quite a success in many areas, and has influenced many others, it was interesting to see what he considers good advice. He lists ten quotes from various others, some...

I write regularly about career topics, hoping that I can help many of you think about your career more, learn more, and move in a direction that's important to you. I've had a great career, one I've enjoyed most of the time, and think that pressing...

I saw this question pop up on the forums: Where do senior DBAs land finally? It's an interesting question, and for people that are searching for the next challenge, I would guess that they're interested in an answer. Here's what I think:
There...

I was watching a few developers present recently and they made extensive use of tools to make their coding go very quickly. At one point in the presentation, after having shown a very efficient coding session, one of the developers stopped to answer a...

It seems as though SQL Injection issues are still around. Attacks from SQL Injection are on the uptick as we begin moving through 2015. As noted in that piece, the constraints put on software developers usually mean that testing and security...

Most of us take whatever jobs we're offered. We send out resumes, go through interviews, and often accept the first offer for employment. In fact, I bet most of us rarely have more than one employer to choose from at a time. Perhaps two if we're...

I've had practice here, and was reminded of this when I ran across this thread on starting a new job. In my career, I've had far too many employers. I'd like to think it's not my fault, but after having double digit jobs, I have to take some...

The Red Gate tag line has been Ship Often...Ship Safe, which works great for developers. Make the changes to code as fast as you can and get them deployed. Keep things smooth (or safe) with a routine and a standard way of deploying code....

I'm sure that many people end going through burnout at some point in their career. While most of us might enjoy technology, and we get a kick out of working with data, at some point you're not going to like your job. This could be because you're...

I often hear the technical staff in many organizations complaining about the amount of work they are tasked with managing. Plenty of technology professionals view their jobs are stressful, and I've had no shortage of people say they would never...

Early in my career, I worked on a large Novell Netware installation. We bought a server that was about 1/4 the size of a modern rack, which contained a number of blade slots each holding some type of hardware: CPUs, disk adapters, network...

I thought this was an interesting post: Your data is not normal. It talks about the fact that we often assume some normal distribution when working with data. We seem to think we can extrapolate, often in a linear fashion, based on past...

I was chatting with a friend recently about our careers and how much we have learned over time. We are both interested in continuing our education in technology and debated how we might proceed. I mentioned that I was thinking to spend some time...

One of the patterns I've seen in some environments is people are trying to deploy changes rapidly to their database backed applications. That's not news, but what is interesting is some of them are staging the deployment of the database changes...

In my career, I've gotten used to working with SSMS on a variety of machines. It seems that as I toiled in various environments, I'd often connect to different SQL Server hosts, or use various consoles that only had the stock Enterprise Manager/SSMS...

The subtitle to this article says it all: IT isn't a monolithic cost sink. I support this idea, though I don't think it's always accurate. Some companies just want an IT cost sink, where the data processing infrastructure is a utility. It...

Working for one company for your whole life. Spending your career with a small company that engages and lives in the local community. Seeing your management and co-workers around town and at leisure events. Being a part of, and loyal to, a company...

I read the book Space Prison a few years ago. It's about a group of humans, attacked and left as prisoners on a harsh planet. There's a few hundred of them, many dying in the first few weeks. They must fight just to survive against the...

I get the weekly SQLskills newsletter, which I always find interesting. There's usually a video on a topic that teaches me something, and as an avid reader, I enjoy hearing about the books that Paul Randal has read. However the...

One of the tools that I found useful early in my development career was the debugger. Being able to track the values of variables, check the call stack, and pause execution of programs was handy. Early in my career, the tools were very rudimentary,...

In the past, there have been times as a DBA when I've been annoyed by the clients submitting tickets to IT. I'm not sure if those incidents were more frustrating than the work I've done as a developer for customers, but both can be very annoying and...

There has been a lot of media attention to Hadoop in the last few years. In fact, Microsoft has spent a lot of resources to build the HDInsight version of the platform and integrate it into SQL Server. I've read quite a bit about how to...

It seems that software always contains bugs. No matter how much time and effort is spent building an application, there will be issues. Sometimes this is because of a lack of testing, and sometimes this is because of poor testing, but in any case, the...

The DevOps movement isn't new in some companies. It's the same coordination and teamwork that has existed for a long time between the development and operations staffs. Developers take advantage of the skills in Operations to get...

I've been writing a little PowerShell lately that will back up databases, move files, and restore them. I'm often testing things, and having scripts to quickly and easily move files is very handy. After one of my posts recently, a reader asked if I'd...

I almost couldn't believe this when I saw the article. The Verizon Cloud is shutting down for 48 hours. Apparently they have maintenance scheduled for this weekend and notified their customers that their virtual machines will be shut down early...

I gave a talk on Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) recently and a number of people in the audience were using the feature. However when I asked how many of them had restored a TDE database, not all hands remained up. When I asked how many people had...

Someone asked me recently if I stored backups of my database in version control. This person wanted to recover from a bad deployment and use a backup to do so. They felt that keeping a copy of the backup in a VCS, alongside the code being deployed,...

It's the slow time of year. As I saw tweeted recently, "And now for the month when nothing gets done." I haven't usually felt this way at a few jobs as the budget and planning process has typically been a part of a busy month. As I've run...

I ran into someone recently that told me they were scared at their job. This person had built a number of ETL jobs to move data around between systems. They were trained as a developer, but had a little experience, got sucked into working with SQL...

Most of us that are data professionals think the best way to make decisions is to use data to justify some course of action. We look for patterns in data, some guidance that the information we have will lead us to make the best choice for our...

The DevOps movement is supposed to promote a closer collaboration between developers, testers, operational people, and really anyone else that must help software gets build and deployed. The developers need to coordinate their needs and requirements...

This is my last day of work this quarter as I start my sabbatical at 5 o'clock today. I'll be gone for the next six weeks, away from SQLServerCentral, trying to improve and grow myself while staying as unwired as I can during that time. The...

I used to pride myself on being able to run through menu selections and configuration options from memory. There have been times when I could describe over the phone the process for using a GUI. I've been able to direct people to log onto SQL...

I applied the Windows 8.1 update a few weeks ago and had some issues with my machine. Windows was fine, but I lost my SQL Server service. A few other users, including some of the SQLServerCentral community also had issues and sent me...

The Surface 3 was announced last week, and I was underwhelmed by the event, especially the presentation itself. The entire spectable didn't seem to compare to some other companies' announcements. I did, however, find myself thinking about...

Have you ever had a development server crash? Have you lost work because of this? Had delays or had to recreate code? You shouldn't, or at least you shouldn't lose much work or time..
There was a time when I offered to manage backups on all...

Each of us is reponsible for negotiating his or her own salary for a position. Often we don't have much leverage to exact a higher salary, and even if it's deserved, so many companies don't have the flexibility for managers to pay higher salaries than...

Tim O'Reilly has written some great pieces over the years on many aspects of technology and change. I've followed him for years and I've enjoyed many of his thoughts and views on our industry. I think he's thoughtful and truly envisions the amazing...

This essay isn't quite Safe For Work (SFW) and might offend a few people, so be warned, but I found it somewhat humorous. It's a look at all the insanity and problems with programming and software in the world. It certainly makes me glad that...

I was talking with some data professionals recently about training and the value of college, work, or some other method of entering the technology business. I have a few thoughts about the different ways of teaching people about this business,...

There's likely a call for speakers open somewhere near you. When I was early in my career, I'd see these calls at large conferences like Comdex, TechEd, even the PASS Summit, and I'd think I'd never get the chance to present, with the...

One of the most important things that you can do as a DBA, or really as any sort of system administrator, is back up your system.Ensuring that you have have backups, and of course, that you can restore them, is the number one priority for sysadmins....

There's a great quote I read, at the end of this article. It says: "...if you think that switching to NoSQL will just let you hand-wave away all of the challenges of running a database, you are terribly misguided." The context is that all too...

Most of us have managers that are picked from the ranks of our technical staff. Often the most talented technical person, or most willing technical staff member, is promoted to manager, given a few hours of training on the various tools that he or she...

Career: an individual's journey through learning, work, and other aspects of life.
Vocation: an occupation to which a person is specially drawn or for which he or she is suited, trained, or qualified.
Which one describes your current employment...

Many of the people that work in technology are interested in gadgets and hardware as much as software. Not all of us, but many of us have had side projects where we've melded hardware and software together. For those of us that are older, and started...

With SQL Server 2014 released, there's the temptation to upgrade for many DBAs. However the licensing costs and debatable improvements in the product will temper the DBA's enthusiasm with the reality of the ROI seen by management. While reading about...

Would you post your password on a wall in your office? Of course not, because other employees, the cleaning crew, even guests walking around your office would be able to access your system with your account. When I read Brian Kelly's post on...

It's over. There's no more MCM program or certification from Microsoft. The last MCM test was given last year and no upgrades are planned for SQL Server 2012 or SQL Server 2014. That's a little sad, though there are quite a few of our SQL...

I often talk with people about building their brands and finding a way to ensure they are a highly desirable employee. One of the ways that I think people can do this is with a technical blog about their career. Having a technical blog allows someone...

Throughout my career I've been looking to consolidate SQL Servers when I find them. The typical employer I've had usually grows their IT infrastructure over time and many projects look like this:
Build or buy a software package
Buy a new...

A friend recently was asked to give a presentation on their career to a group of 12 year olds. It was a challenge to engage the students, and my friend was surprised that very few of the kids were interested in technology. I was disappointed as well...

This is what you build to juggle 6,000 tweets a second. That's the headline that caught my eye and it's about the challenges of Twitter and the data that they handle. Twitter definitely has a tough problem, one that few of us have, but perhaps they...

It's 2014. SQL Server 2000 is 14 years old, but there are still quite of you managing instances. SQL Server 2005 is 9 years old, and I'm sure more of you still deal with that version. I know because I work for a software vendor and I'm constantly...

I saw this post recently about security and preparing for a data breach. The title caught my eye because it implies that we're all doomed. Do the rest of you think that? Is it a question of when we'll have a security breach not if?
Given the...

Big Data is constantly in the news. We've been asked at SQLserverCentral to try and develop some articles, perhaps even a stairway to explain what Big Data is and how we might use it. I'm still trying to grasp the concepts myself, and unlike the...

Customer Reviews

Steve's shows are great

by
MillenniumKnight

Steve is a matter-of-fact DBA that has a lot of experience in the trenches of database development and database maintenance. He is a straight-shooter that doesn't pull any punches. He offers his opinions and makes you question what you would do in the same situations. A must listen for anyone responsible for data in an organization.

Excellent Podcast

by
aaig

Steve is great at providing information for the Database Administrator. I am a 'part time' DBA. And I get a lot out of this podcast and SQL Sever Central.

Sr. Systems Engineer

by
Steve Poe

I look forward to hearing Steve's podcast each week on what DBA/IT people are going and how the industry is evolving. Balance technical with business goals is always a never-ending opportunity.